Historically Thinking

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the midst of the Allgauer Alps, not that far from the Austrian border. While other Alpine towns like Garmisch-Partenkirchen, to the east in Oberbayern, or Andermatt in Switzerland benefited from proximity to mountain passes and the trade routes that crossed them, and other towns like Berchtesgaden grew rich from proximity to natural resources, or the development of a unique craft economy, Obertsdorf had none of those things. It was where the road literally ended, and for centuries remained an out of the way community dependent on subsistence farming, and some desultory iron mining.  But with the arrival of the railroad, and tourism, Obertsdorf began to be connected to a wider world. While some at first attempted to ignore the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, that movement eventually captivated many Oberstdorfers as well.  Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel have co-written A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism. In it they describe the Third Reich as seen from Oberstdorf , and the Third Reich in Oberstdorf. They recount acts of violence, complicity, and various levels of resistance, from the 1920s through to the end of the war–which, for the republic of France, officially ended in Oberstdorf. For Further Investigation We covered some of the same ground in the conversation with Peter Fritzsche in Episode 244, in which he focused on Hitler's first hundred days as Chancellor of Germany Julia Boyd has previously written Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism, 1919-1945

William Hunter was a radical advocate for American democracy. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was the founder of the second newspaper west of the Alleghenies, and the first newspaper editor to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts. Arguably a Jacksonian Democrat before Andrew Jackson first ran for president, Hunter served the Jackson Administration, and as a civil servant seven successive administrations. Yet that brief biography obscures his very interesting origins. For William Hunter had been born in New Brunswick, yes, but as the son of John Hunter of the 26th Regiment of the Line. For the first ten years of his life William followed his father as his peacetime service in British America became combat service in the rebellious territory of the new United States. Departing for Britain at age ten in 1778 when his sick father was detached for recruiting duties, William returned to the United States fifteen years later, his father dead, his mother and sister left behind. He was now a committed republican, arriving in Philadelphia in the midst of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. He would never again travel back across the ocean, or see his mother and again. Gene Procknow describes the ups and downs, and twist and turns of William Hunter’s eventful life in his new book William Hunter Finding Free Speech: A British Soldier’s Son Who Became an Early American. Formerly a management consultant with a global consulting firm, Gene Procknow has become a careful historian of early American history; William Hunter is his first book. For Further Investigation Gene's website has some wonderful "behind the book" material Here's an article Gene wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution on different perspectives on the quartering of British soldiers in New Brunswick, NJ In the course of the episode, Gene referenced Don Hagist. Here's a conversation with Don about punishment in the British Army during the American Revolution; and here's a conversation with Don that ranges much more widely into the society and culture of the British Army that fought in America Since Dan Gullotta, friend of the show, used to do a podcast called Age of Jackson, we've tended to avoid American history from roughly 1815 to 1850. But here's an exception to the rule, a conversation about a no less radical Democrat than William Hunter, none other than Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. John Zaborney, Slaves For Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia

Since the Middle Ages, food has always been sold on the streets of London. Women and men, boys and girls, have seemingly sold everything that can be eaten, from shellfish and fried fish, to baked potatoes and baked pies, to handfuls of fruit and cups of milk. They were far from being the most respectable members of London’s society, either in the late sixteenth century, the late nineteenth century, or any of the periods in between. Yet they were absolutely an absolutely vital link in feeding the growing population, part of a chain that extended from the coasts, ports, the gardens of Kent and Surrey, and from suburban cows, until finishing its journey in a customers mouth. In his new book Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London, Charlie Taverner chronicles the daily life of the street vendors over three centuries, following them as they make their way with baskets and carts through the urban landscape. This enables him to not only reimagine a vital part of London’s history, but to reconsider the process of urbanization and modernization.  Charlie Taverner is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. A social historian of cities and food, he was in a previous life a business and  agricultural journalist.  For Further Investigation Islington: no cows now present For rabbits traveling to London, and much more besides This is a conversation about urban history, and many other things besides. For another conversation which describes the life of the city in a very different way, listen to Episode 133: Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, or, Rabies in the City David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 Transcript Al: Charlie Taverner, welcome to Historically Thinking. Charlie: Fabulous to be here. Thank you very much. Al: So I guess we'll talk later about how being a business and agricultural journalist and influenced this book. Imagine I could see it sort of the experience and fingerprints all over it. But this is a book about it's about a business, it's about a centuries of a sort of type of business and one intimately [00:02:00] connected with agriculture, but we're not gonna talk about that yet. As you make clear, the sources of who Hawkers were are very iffy. They're based on middle class or gentlemen. Taking long walks through the city, making observations, which may or may not be valid, or they're by court cases or whatever. So I think there's the idea, we have the, we should talk about the prototypical vision of the London Fish Wife, which is that seems to be the, that is the vision of the Hawker. But then going from the fish wife to who were they really, are they the lowest, they can't be the lowest of the lower class, but where are they? Do they fit into the new middling type in the 16th century? Where, who are they? Where do they come from? Charlie: Yeah, I think I talk about in the book, one of the sections I term all sorts of Londoners. And that's because Hawkers were a really diverse bunch of people. Many of them were very [00:03:00] poor. Really scraping by doing other forms of menial work. Things like sweeping the streets, collecting old bones and rubbish. Or later on holding up sandwich boards and signs on the streets, basic forms of work. And others were much closer to the kind of shopkeepers people who had a bit more respectability, respectability about them. And a range of complex kind of skills in trades like retail. So you've got a, you've got a wide range of abilities and skill within there. And what that means is you've got people kind of work doing this work very occasionally, and you've got people just doing this work kind of fulltime. So the job itself can be very different. And it meant also that in there were very different sorts of people involved in the street trade. And one of the big transitions we see is around the gender of street sellers. So you start off. Early in the early in the period that I'm interested in the late...

In the early sixteenth century there emerged upon the world stage a cast of royal characters that could almost persuade the most hardened social historian to read Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In Europe were Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, and Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. In Russia ruled Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible;  in India Babur and Akbar, founders of the Moghul Dynasty;  and in Persia the Savafid rulers Shah Ismail and Shah Tahmasb. As my guest writes, all of these monarchs “resorted to warfare as an instrument of empire building…sought to establish control over their own elites and aristocracies… paid particular attention to creating and maintaining a multilayered reputation as ruler, patron, soldier, [and] statesman… [and] sought to establish central control over religious matters during a time of intense theological debates and spiritual anxieties. They were also acutely aware of each other, and they openly competed among themselves for control of land and resources and for prestige.” In their geographical midst was one to whom all looked, against whom all compared themselves, and with whom nearly all of them competed in the game of kingdoms. This was Süleyman, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, known to contemporaries as “the Grand Turk”, and ever after as “the Magnificent.” In all the endeavours of his contemporaries, he at the very least matched them, and he usually excelled. Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman is a fascinating new biography of this towering figure, a study not only of his life but of his time. Its author Kaya Şahín is with us today; he is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, where he also serves in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures For Further Investigation Some of the European side of this story has previously been discussed in Episode 166, a conversation with Catherine Fletcher about the Italian Renaissance; and in Episode 149, which focused on the history of Eastern Europe, a history that is unimaginable without the presence of the Ottoman Empire. The following books are suggested by Kaya, some with his comments. Cornell H Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541-1600) Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire: "a biography of Suleyman’s wife." John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe: "not a work of academic scholarship, but an open-minded treatment of Suleyman together with the other royal figures of the period." Suleymanname: The Illustrated History of Suleyman the Magnificent, edited by Esin Atil. Erdem Çipa, The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World: "a study on Süleyman’s father." Emine Fetvaci, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court: "although mostly dealing with a period following Süleyman’s death, it is a terrific study of Ottoman visual culture, book arts, history-writing, etc." Nikolay Antov, The Ottoman 'Wild West': The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: "a solid treatment of Ottoman expansion in the Balkans as well as the issue of conversion to Islam, etc." Christopher Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty: on new Ottoman notions of sovereignty.

This is the second of our continuing series on intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today I'm interested in exploring the social science of intellectual humility. Igor Grossman is a social psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “Most of our work,” he writes, describing his lab, “either focuses on how people make sense of the world around them—their expectations, lay theories, meta-cognitions, forecasts—or it concerns how larger cultural forces impact human behavior and societal change.” That makes him the perfect person to talk to about intellectual humility, and historical thinking. For Further Investigation Tenelle Porter, Abdo Elnakouri, Ethan A. Meyers, Takuya Shibayama, Eranda Jayawickreme and Igor Grossmann, "Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility" The Wisdom and Culture Lab World After COVID Igor Grossmann, Oliver Twardus, Michael E. W. Varnum, Eranda Jayawickreme, John McLevey, "Expert Predictions of Societal Change: Insights from the World after COVID Project" Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia (and the Center for Open Science) discusses the replication crisis with Russ Roberts The Center of Open Science has been a force for change in the "replication crisis"

The medieval warm period began in the mid-tenth century, around and about  950 AD. A warmer climate led to higher agricultural yields, and in an agricultural society that meant surplus profits. These were invested in building monasteries and cathedrals; they attracted the attention of larcenous Scandinavians, who became known as the Vikings. Benefiting from warmer temperatures, they traveled widely, built colonies from Greenland to Ireland to central Russia. Nor were they alone. Medieval people settled in sparsely populated internal regions, like Yorkshire, and Abruzzi. And one of the many consequences of this wealth and growing cosmopolitan sphere was a wealthier and vigorous reforming Roman papacy. Europe was not alone in experiencing social, economic, and cultural changes caused by the Medieval warm period. While the climatic changes were different everywhere, my  guest Timothy Pauketat argues that in Meso America the medieval warm period also brought about a period of cultural interchange, stretching from the Mayan kingdoms north across Mexico, into what is now the American southwest, and as far east and north as  the central valley of the Mississippi River.  Timothy Pauketat is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and as Illinois State Archaeologist is the Director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. He is the pre- eminent archaeologist of the Mississippian civilization that centered on the area around modern St. Louis, and his latest book Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality connects the Mississippians to their neighbors near and far. It gives the reader a unique portrait of a world now almost completely lost to us–but still visible, in places, if you know where to look.   For Further Investigation  One of the unique things about Tim Pauketat's book is that each chapter concludes with a list of places to visit that have been mentioned in the chapter, or are related to something in the chapter. Here are a few of them; the descriptions are his own, from Gods of Thunder Teotihuacan, Mexico: "No archaeological site in the Americas, possibly the entire world, is greater in ruins than the Classic-period city of Teotihuacan, north of Mexico City." The website CultureTrip provides the "Ultimate Guide to Discovery Mexico's Teotihaucán." Tamtoc (Tantoc), Mexico: "Fly to the site virtually using Google Earth (Ruinas deTamtoc) before you arrive in the city of Tamuín by car or air.Tamtoc park sits on the inner bend of the Tampaon River, and only the central core of the site is publicly owned. Other portions lie in fields and pastures outside the park boundaries, including the eastern half of the site’s largest mound." Horseshoe Lake State Park, Illinois: "To begin your tour of the archaeological site of Cahokia, start with some environmental context... Entering the park, you will immediately see a great oxbow lake in front of you.The other side of this lake is actually an island, with the oxbow and the park continuing to the industrial landscape on the horizon. Even today, Horseshoe Lake and its teeming animal and plant life give you a good idea of the richness and variety of the landscape a thousand years ago." Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois: "After touring the Interpretive Center, exit the building on the west side and walk into the site’s Grand Plaza. Ignore the mowed green grass, which would not have covered the grounds centuries ago. It takes ten to fifteen minutes to traverse the plaza to the front steps of Monks Mound, which you climb to reach the 100-foot-high summit. From the top, you can see Horseshoe Lake to the north, St. Louis to the west, and the bluff horizon to the east and south."

From the beginning of the university in the middle ages, relations between town and gown–between students and citizens– began badly and got worse. Perhaps the lowest point was the St. Scholastica Riot in Oxford, beginning on February 12th, 1355, in which a tavern punchup led to an episode of urban warfare–which is no exaggeration in describing three days of street battles, and besieged colleges, with showers of arrows going back and forth that ultimately claimed the lives of somewhere between seventy and one hundred on both sides. In comparison to this, complaints by modern students that townies’ cars  speed up when they see undergraduates crossing the street seem positively quaint. David Staley and Dominic Endicott have a different model in mind for town and gown interaction. In their new book Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets, they seek “to inspire as many people to act, moving their town, college, company, philanthropy, endowment into a more sustainable growth model.” They envision a new societal model, anchored solidly in the local, while enmeshed in the global knowledge economy. At the heart of this model will be a new way of doing college. Dominic Endicott is a venture capitalist, a partner at Northstar Ventures, and lives in New Hampshire. David Staley is a Professor of History at the Ohio State University; this is his third appearance on the podcast. For Further Investigation David Staley has previously appeared on Historically Thinking in Episode 111 to talk about this book Alternative Universities (which is very connected to Knowledge Towns) and again in Episode 169 to talk about how he works out scenarios about the future–with which Knowledge Towns is replete. If you haven't already, consult the many podcasts which are cataloged as "Higher Education: A Guide for the Perplexed" The website and social movement Strong Towns was very influential in the conception of Knowledge Towns. I've been listening since about 2015, and highly recommend it! Biochar is referenced several times in the book. I had to look it up here. Regenerative Agriculture also gets referenced many times, including in our conversation. You can find out more here from Gabe Brown of North Dakota, who believes (or, really, has proven) that regenerative agriculture not only is beneficial to the earth, but allows farmers to actually make money rather than descending ever deeper into debt. Main Street America The Walton Foundation's research on micropolitan areas

If we believed in click bait, we would title this "one weird historical thinking trick to save your country." But it's not, so you get a boring but highly accurate title. For this is the first of special series of occasional episodes through the rest of 2023 that explore the connection between intellectual humility and historically thinking. Since the podcast began, we’ve made the claim that historical thinking “gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility.” But what exactly do we mean by intellectual humility? What is it? What’s it for? Why should we want it? And how is it related to historical thinking? In the last decade there’s been an explosion of interest in the concept of intellectual humility. One of the leaders in the field has been Michael Patrick Lynch. He’s the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he is also Director of the Humanities Institute. Lynch began his professional career as an epistemologist, writing books with titles like  The Nature of Truth, and Truth as One and Many. But  then In 2015, Lynch published what now seems like an even more prophetic and insightful book than it was at the time, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. In it he explored the philosophical implications of the rapid shift to a knowledge economy, and the cataracts of information available to us from the devices that we carry around in our pockets. He has since published Know-It All Society: Truth and Arrogance in American Political Culture, which is a title that seems almost too on-the-nose. For Further Investigation To find out more about historical thinking, go here; for an introduction, try Episode 39 Michael Lynch's TED talk on "How to see past your own perspective and find truth" Michael Lynch's "Conviction and Humility", the focus of the second half of the discussion, was a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility Lynch's Exercise in Historical Reimagining–do the following without using information available on the internet. What is the capital of Bulgaria? Is a four-stroke outboard engine more efficient than a two-stroke? What is the phone number of my US representative? What is the best-reviewed restaurant in Austin, Texas, this week? Transcript Al: [00:00:00] This episode of historically thinking was made possible by a grant from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley. To learn more, go to ggsc.berkeley.edu.  Welcome to Historically Thinking, a podcast about history and how to think about history. For more on this episode, go to historically thinking.org, where you can find links and readings related to today's podcast, comment on the conversation, and sign up for our newsletter. And consider becoming a member of the Historically Thinking Common Room, a community of Patreon supporters. Since this podcast began, we've made the claim that historical thinking gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense. And that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility.  But what exactly do we mean by intellectual humility? What is it? What's it for? Why should we want it? And how is it related to historical thinking? In the last decade, there's been an [00:01:00] explosion of interest in research over the concept of intellectual humility. One of the leaders in the field has been Michael Patrick Lynch. He's the Board of trustees. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. where he is also director of the humanities Institute. Lynch began his professional career as an epistemologist, writing books with titles, like The Nature of Truth and truth as one and many. But then in 2015 Lynch published, what now seems, and even more prophetic,

So, said an uncle to a student of mine, you’re getting a history degree, huh? When you graduate, you gonna get a job in a history store?  The numbers show that the uncle’s jab is winning. As friend of the podcast Jon Lauck has demonstrated in a Fall 2022 editorial in the Middle West Review,  the number of history majors in US colleges and universities has dropped by more than 50%. Departments have begun to shrink as a consequence of this, and that shrinkage shows no sign in many institutions of stopping until numbers hit zero. And it’s hard not to believe that fueling this is the question of where you are ever going to use that history degree–or any liberal arts degree. Add to that disheartening news of the recent arrival of ChatGPT, followed closely by New Bing, AI programs that promise to write every term paper that any professor ever contemplated assigning, and there doesn’t seem to be a point to the liberal arts Today I’m talking with my old friend Brent Orrell, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in (among other things) workforce and retraining programs, and preparing youths for jobs–and of late he’s also been thinking a lot about the impact of artificial intelligence on work, labor, and vocation. He’s been a guest on the podcast, back in episode 169, and he has his own podcast, Hardly Working, which I recommend to you for all your labor, workforce, and vocation needs. The accompanying picture was created by AI image generator DALL-E 2, which was asked to "create a painting in the style of Vermeer of a young woman working in a history store." "For Further Investigation Two articles from Brent on technology, AI, and work: "Brave New Technology" and "The Federal AI Shambles" At Inside Higher Education, Susan D'Agostino has basically cornered the Higher Ed AI beat. On October 26, IHE posted her article "Machines Can Craft Essays. How Should Writing Be Taught Now?", and that was followed by another, and another, and yet another, until the most recent (as of this podcast's drop) "Chat GPT is Here. But Most Faculty Lack AI Policies." HUMANITIES WORKS: Myths and Realities about Humanities Majors The Knowledge Navigator Video from Apple–an amazing piece of speculative fiction. Though as outlandish as any movie when it comes to depicting a professor's office.

Everything has a history, even breakfast cereal. And that history is involved with the history of grain–which means it is involved with both the history of agriculture and urbanism; how humans mark time during the day; meal customs, which means it’s also involved with the history of the family; nutrition and health, and all the ideas and fears involved with those terms, as well as the history of science and, believe it or not, the history of religion and of political progressivism;  and, since the late twentieth century, marketing and mass-culture. Breakfast cereal, it turns out, is connected to just about everything. With me to talk about her new book Breakfast Cereal: A Global History is Kathryn Cornell Dolan. She is an associate professor in the department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her previous books are Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in US Literature, 1850-1905 and Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination. For Further Investigation Previous podcasts interlink with this conversation in ways that I didn't anticipate. Rachel Laudan spoke about the history of food in Episode 44; Jonathan Rees and I discussed nutrition and diet as part of our conversation about J. Harvey Wiley in Episode 222; and John Arthur talked about the importance of beer to nutrition and culture throughout world history in Episode 253. Atlas Obscura has an article on the surviving buildings of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. They are amazingly big. If you would like to benefit from the wealth of C.W. Post, you can do so thanks to his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post who grew the fortune even bigger. She also built amazingly big houses, including one in Florida she named Mar-a-Lago...can't think if I've ever heard of it before. Her home in Washington, DC, was Hillwood, and is now a museum now open to the public. Kathryn's book is notable for having recipes at the back. Until you buy it, you can content yourself with these porridge recipes from around the world, collected by at Saveur magazine. Who hasn't at some point really craved turkey congee? Better than a gobbler sandwich the day after Thanksgiving!